NaNoWriMo update at the halfway mark (yay)

I keep meaning to blog! And it isn’t that I am SO BUSY – NaNoWriMo has become so all encompassing that all my draft blogs are navel-gazing treatises on processes which inform the start of my day but go by the wayside when it’s ten pm and I still have seven hundred words to go. Anyway.

In short, I am well ahead, 70% done (35,286 words out of 50,000) at the halfway mark.

I won’t be able to keep up this pace, but that was my point in pushing hard early – a strategy developed with and supported by my wife, who took point on family issues these last two weeks.

Still, to say a marathon is unsustainable as a lifestyle is to miss the point of the extremity. The point of the extremity is something personal to each extremist.

I needed to show myself I could push through a process driven by an arbitrary metric, even if I wound up stuck or lost, or without the guidance of a solid outline, at points along the way – and, while accommodating home and family demands that will not go away, nor would I want them to.

I am doing that, and well.It’s also turned out to be a hugely fun ride, the closest writing has come to skiing, since my youth – fast, nimble, sustained.

Long-form narrative fiction involves a combination of skill, vision, tradition and style that cannot be taught so much as pointed out and striven towards, like dance. This project has showed me that I have those elements in my repertoire now, and I know how to use them to satisfy my vision.

To so constantly go back to my blank screen, my halting fragmented notes, my doubts – and still come up with words that sound like they were mouthed by a real person about a real event – what flying balletic joy this is!